Word: gruffness
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...malevolence. He is but one example of the pitch-perfect casting and superbly restrained performances delivered by the supporting cast, which is a cavalcade of British acting luminaries. Dame Maggie Smith returns as the cantankerous yet kindly Professor McGonagall, while Robbie Coltrane provides a comic foil as the lovably gruff gamekeeper Hagrid. Simultaneously though, moments of hair-raising creepiness are offset by the considerable humor throughout, provided largely by Kenneth Branagh’s portrayal of new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, Gilderoy Lockhart. Branagh positively revels in Lockhart’s self-obsessed dandy dress and mannerisms...
Things looked very different little more than two years ago, when Lafley, 55, took over P&G, based in Cincinnati, Ohio. His gruff predecessor, Durk Jager, had launched a crash course to shake up the notoriously insular, slow-footed company but was forced out after just 17 months of expensive product launches that left consumers yawning. P&G had repeatedly failed to deliver expected earnings, and its stock tumbled 50% in six months. With most of the company's resources and best people focused on developing the next blockbuster new product, sales for the established brands were stagnating, market share...
...election day in Iran, and a female official has landed on the remote island of Kish to be chauffeured by a gruff soldier and collect the locals' votes. It's a comic chore for all concerned. One old fellow wonders why his favorite candidate, God, isn't listed. There are no hanging-chad jokes, but the film's spare wit is as applicable to Broward County as to the Persian Gulf. Secret Ballot offers further evidence that an Islamic regime can foster humanist satires with a critical, political edge...
...eyed and desperate, shanghais the show. That's no mean feat for an ingenue, and except for Zhou and Glen Chin, all the film's actors are amateurs Chan plucked from the street. Despite the director's deft touch with comic characters, not all manage watchable performances. Chin's gruff, soulful Chu is a match for Tong Tong, and Leung earns kudos as the least annoying fat kid in recent Chinese cinema. But Ho's Ming does little more than sweat. Wong's manic energy nicely counters the Chus' torpor, but his strangled-cat tone deserves an even worse punishment...
...Perchov, the novel's other, more successfully realized narrator, tells a very different tale. He acts as a translator when Foer takes a trip to Ukraine. Bluff, gruff and unflappable, he writes in broken English: "I dig Negroes, particularly Michael Jackson. I dig to disseminate very much currency at famous nightclubs in Odessa." (His English gets better?and less hilarious?as the book goes on.) Accompanied by Perchov's narcoleptic grandfather and a flatulent dog named Sammy Davis Jr., Foer and Perchov set off into the Ukrainian countryside to search for what's left of present-day Trachimbrod...